African farmers now have a new way to manage alfatoxin, a naturally occuring deadly poison that makes their crops unfit for consumption or export.
Scientists at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), have devised a fast, simple and affordable test kit for detecting the aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is produced by a fungus that can easily grow on many crops, including common food crops like maize, groundnut, sorghum, and cassava. It can infect them both in the field and during post-harvest storage.
Many countries reject agriculture imports exceeding certain levels of aflatoxin, costing African farmers millions of dollars each year in lost sales. Meanwhile, people who inadvertently consume a large quantity of the contaminated food can get very sick, as the toxin can cause potentially fatal problems in the liver and intestines.
Since the aflatoxin contamination is invisible in commodities, the key is detection. In developed countries, farmers routinely use detection technologies to manage outbreaks. But in developing countries, the tests have in the past been too expensive and too difficult for most farmers to implement. The new detection kit developed by ICRISAT has changed the situation by cutting the cost of testing crops from US$25 to $1 per sample.
"It's available as a small, simple kit that can be used even for most remote rural farms to monitor grains and nuts and improve storage techniques to avoid serious contaminations. The end result is safer products for consumers and higher returns for African farmers," said Dr. William Dar, director general of ICRISAT.
The test uses an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to rapidly detect the presence of aflatoxin.
Several years ago there were fears that new standards in developed countries for acceptable levels of aflatoxins in groundnuts could cost African countries $670 million in lost exports. In Malawi, which saw its status in the 1970s as a major groundnut exporter eroded by aflatoxin outbreaks, the National Small Farmer Association of Malawi (NASFAM) has successfully used the new aflatoxin detection kit as part of a broader effort to regain and re-establish itself with its once-lucrative European export markets.
Several CGIAR-supported centres, including ICRISAT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (often referred to by its Spanish language acronym CIMMYT), and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), are putting into place a range of innovative practices to combat aflatoxin contamination in several crops. In addition to the detection test, the techniques include efforts to control the toxin using bacteria as a bio-control agent, breeding crops that are resistant to aflatoxin, and changing cultivation practices to limit opportunities for contaminations.
More than 5 billion people in developing countries are constantly exposed to aflatoxins by unknowingly consuming contaminated foods. So reducing aflatoxin contamination of African crops could also offer considerable health benefits, particularly to African children.
CGIAR
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